Ubisoft’s support page on transitioning PlayStation 4 titles to next-gen versions may have revealed more information pertaining to Sony’s plan for backwards compatibility on PlayStation 5. Ubisoft’s support page says: “As part of their next-gen upgrade process, PlayStation offer a number of features designed to help you move from PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5. PlayStation 4 players will be able to join multiplayer games with PlayStation 5 players. Backwards compatibility will be available for supported PlayStation 4 titles, but will not be possible for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, or PlayStation games.”
Prior to unveiling the PlayStation 5 at the Future Games Show, Mark Cerny held a “Deep Dive” revealing some of the technical aspects and overall goals that Sony is striving for with PlayStation 5. One of the things that Cerny discussed was backwards compatibility and how it works. With the PlayStation 3, there was a chipset of the PlayStation 2 that allowed those games to run on PS3.
Now, with PlayStation 5, Sony wants to have it like how Xbox does it and have the PlayStation 5 switch to a PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 4 Pro mode when the older game launches. Sony later clarified as of now, they are testing thousands of games to make sure they work on PlayStation 5 and they believe that the overwhelming majority will be playable on the next-gen system. Sony has not responded yet to Ubisoft’s support page and if the new details regarding backwards compatibility are true or not. The Ubisoft support page has since been updated to have no mention of backwards compatibility.
Ever since Microsoft introduced backwards compatibility for Xbox One, the company has not wavered and continues to support bringing more older games available to play. They plan to continue this for Xbox Series X. After the delay of Halo Infinite, Microsoft doubled down on the fact that they will have thousands of games ready to play when the system launches in November because of backwards compatibility.